Larry Parsons: Blaming hippies for decades of decline

Oh, look what President Obama inherited from President Bush — two wars, the worst economy since the Depression, soaring deficits and a White House TV room where the president can almost choke on a pretzel without anyone noticing.

The reply, which gains traction after 3½ years in power, is: "Quit whining. You've been in the Oval Office since 2009. What happened to the hope, you dope?"

So the standoff over recent history continues, except among most Americans, who, polls show, know so little about history they believe the Whiskey Rebellion was a dust-up over an alluring woman at the Jack Daniels factory.

I'd drop this quicker than a 5-pound treatise on the locks on the St. Lawrence Seaway but for the constant carping from conservative thinkers over something that happened not just four years ago, but nearly 50 years ago.

What happened back then, of course, were hippies.

The way they see it, hippies were and continue to be responsible for the breakdown of all that is good about America — ethics, morality, self-suffiency, self-restraint, the family, churches and, possibly, the morally bankrupt Penn State football program.

By their logic, the Wall Street traders who rolled up trillions of dollars of dicey home loans into dicier securities were really narcissistic hippies rolling the biggest doobie in history. They just wanted to look cool. And beads and Roman sandals won't do any more. They must take their trips on private jets and nine-figure bonuses to show "The Man" today.

Real hippies declared the hippie dead in 1967, a few years before the counterculture — a term as dated as "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too" — was embraced by Madison Avenue, Hollywood and corporate retailers to make big bucks off a bong-full of products with a rebel-rebel allure to Middle America.

The caricature of a hippie, mastered by conservative cartoonist Al Capp in the 1960s, of a scraggly longhair with flies buzzing around smelly armpits, supplanted the Cadillac-driving welfare fraudster as the most popular conservative cartoon figure of the past half-century. It returned in force with the recent Occupy Whatever protests, along with the "Get a job" taunts.

Republicans have controlled the presidency for 28 years since 1969, compared with 15 years of Democratic (overt hippie-philes, by the way) semi-control.

Still, the hippie worldview (through a kaleidoscope, preferably) continues, somehow, to undermine the country's foundations. That's the steadfast opinion among the crowd that clings to Chappaquiddick and Hanoi Jane, their own 1960s amulets.

I grant that hippies are guilty for drum circles, reams of information about whale songs, strip-mining power crystals and a good share of overbearing self-righteousness. But why blame hippies for all that's gone wrong in the past 50 years? The crash of 2008, the Vietnam War's tragic denouement, decades of covered-up sexual predation by Catholic priests. These are but a few events that I've seen linked — with a few giant steps of logic — to free concerts in Golden Gate Park many years ago.

This is not serious history nor serious thinking.

The "blame it all on the hippies" impulse actually is evidence of a simple-mindedness summed up by a catch phrase from those distant days. "If it feels good, do it."